“The history of computing has been a history of falling prices (and consequently expanding uses). But the arrival of cloud computing – which transforms computer processing, data storage, and software applications into utilities served up by central plants – marks a fundamental change in the economics of computing. It pushes down the price and expands the availability of computing in a way that effectively removes, or at least radically diminishes, capacity constraints on users.”

“My favorite example, which is about a year old now, is both simple and revealing. In late 2007, the New York Times faced a challenge. Fortunately, a software programmer at the Times, Derek Gottfrid, had been playing around with Amazon Web Services for a number of months, and he realized that Amazon’s new computing utility, Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), might offer a solution.”